Leon Trotsky: The Transitional
programme

The Proletariat and its Leadership

The economy, the state, the politics of the bourgeoisie and its international
relations are completely blighted by a social crisis, characteristic of a
prerevolutionary state of society. The chief obstacle in the path of
transforming the prerevolutionary into a revolutionary state is the opportunist
character of proletarian leadership: its petty bourgeois cowardice before the
big bourgeoisie and its perfidious connection with it even in its death agony.

In all countries the proletariat is racked by a deep disquiet. The
multimillioned masses again and again enter the road of revolution. But each
time they are blocked by their own conservative bureaucratic machines.

The Spanish proletariat has made a series of heroic attempts since April 1931
to take power in its hands and guide the fate of society. However, its own
parties (Social Democrats, Stalinists, Anarchists, POUMists) — each in its own
way acted as a brake and thus prepared Franco's triumphs.

In France, the great wave of "sit down" strikes, particularly
during June 1936, revealed the wholehearted readiness of the proletariat to
overthrow the capitalist system. However, the leading organizations (Socialists,
Stalinists, Syndicalists) under the label of the Popular Front succeeded in
canalizing and damming, at least temporarily, the revolutionary stream.

The unprecedented wave of sit down strikes and the amazingly rapid growth of
industrial unionism in the United States (the CIO) is the most indisputable
expression of the instinctive striving of the American workers to raise
themselves to the level of the tasks imposed on them by history. But here. too,
the leading political organizations, including the newly created CIO, do
everything possible to keep in check and paralyze the revolutionary pressure of
the masses.

The definite passing over of the Comintern to the side of bourgeois order,
its cynically counterrevolutionary role throughout the world, particularly in
Spain, France, the United States and other "democratic" countries,
created exceptional supplementary difficulties for the world proletariat. Under
the banner of the October Revolution, the conciliatory politics practiced by the
"People's Front" doom the working class to impotence and clear the
road for fascism.

"People's Fronts" on the one hand—fascism on the other: these are
the last political resources of imperialism in the struggle against the
proletarian revolution. From the historical point of view, however, both these
resources are stopgaps. The decay of capitalism continues under the sign of the
Phrygian cap in France as under the sign of the swastika in Germany. Nothing
short of the overthrow of the bourgeoisie can open a road out.

The orientation of the masses is determined first by the objective conditions
of decaying capitalism, and second, by the treacherous politics of the old
workers' organizations. Of these factors, the first, of course, is the decisive
one: the laws of history are stronger than the bureaucratic apparatus. No matter
how the methods of the social betrayers differ — from the "social"
legislation of Blum to the judicial frame-ups of Stalin—they will never
succeed in breaking the revolutionary will of the proletariat. As time goes on,
their desperate efforts to hold back the wheel of history will demonstrate more
clearly to the masses that the crisis of the proletarian leadership, having
become the crisis in mankind's culture, can be resolved only by the Fourth
International.